


Swallowed by the Moon

by pendrecarc



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark is not Evil, Enemies Forced To Work Together, F/F, Good Is Not Soft, Rivals to Lovers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-26 20:04:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16688023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: Dani was in the gardens of the quarter-moon when the gates opened to the enemy.





	Swallowed by the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FireEye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/gifts).



Dani was in the gardens of the quarter-moon when the gates opened to the enemy.

The gardens were on the second level of the convent, overlooking the inner courtyard, and she was pruning the flower-studded vines that spilled over the balcony when the outer doors opened to admit a woman cloaked head to foot in dusty brown. She looked out, curious, for it was rare that anyone came to them unannounced, and saw the guard in her black veil come out to meet the visitor; saw the exchange of words and the summoning of a second guard; and moments later saw the woman fling off her cloak, revealing the blinding flash of gold in the sunlight. Dani dropped her shears.

Dani had seen one of the sun’s assassins before, when she was very young, before she was swallowed by the moon. In her imagination they were all like that long-ago priestess, glimpsed for a few startling moments and never forgotten: slight and wiry, with light skin and hair gone silver-gray. This woman by contrast was tall and powerfully built, her bare face brown as Dani’s own, and the long hair bound tight to her head was inky black.

The gold-hilted sword curved long and deadly at her side was the same, though; there was no mistaking that.

For a moment Dani stared, and then astonishment gave way to the certainty she was about to see murder done, red blood spilled hot and bright for the sun’s blessing on the smooth flagstones. Before she could open her mouth to scream, the sword was drawn; but then it was being held out hilt-first toward the closest guard, and the woman was kneeling low to the ground in submission.

Two more guards came into the courtyard, one on each side of her; they took the woman by the arms and raised her, and then they led her away. She went without resistance.

Dani stood frozen a while longer, working through her shock and confusion; it hardly seemed possible that this thing had happened. For one of the sun’s own priestesses to come here, to the moon’s domain, was unheard of—the High Priestesses might meet with on occasion, when summoned to the capitol in great pomp and ceremony, when the Council of the Six had need of their advice. But a single assassin, with no warning—and only to surrender?

Usually Dani was glad of the quiet of the gardens at midday, while most of the moon’s children lay sleeping and when, if she listened carefully, she could hear the crash of waves on the cliffs below and indulge a memory of the sea. Today she wished she had a companion, to confirm the evidence of her own eyes and speculate with her about what it might mean. Alone, she turned it over in her mind until she was half mad with curiosity, and nearly ran down to wake her phase-mother and tell her everything. But she had a sense for when to hold her tongue, and she knew that if this strange arrival was meant to be common knowledge, it would be spread about soon enough. So she turned back to her work until the bells chimed at moonrise, and then she went down to join her phase-sisters at prayers.

The image of the sun’s assassin, proud and straight as she drew her sword, and somehow unreduced even as she knelt, seemed burned behind Dani’s eyelids as she fell back into the rhythms of the convent. She lifted her voice in the slow rolling chords of the dusk hymns, drank from the clay cup of goat’s milk in her turn, and left the chapel as she always did to return to her cell; and when sleep came she dreamed of the sun.

A knock woke her well before her phase’s accustomed hour. She started up from her pallet, pulled a shawl over her robe, and went to the door to see the moon’s High Priestess standing outside.

“Danira, waxing crescent,” said Ato the High Priestess, in her clear and well-trained voice. She pitched it low, so as not to wake Dani’s neighbors. “I would have a private word with you.”

The convent was not so large, and their High Priestess not so aloof, that Dani was unaccustomed to seeing or even speaking to her. But to be singled out like this set her heart beating hard in apprehension, and she clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling in the mild spring night as they crossed from the crescent quarters to the main building, where the High Priestess kept her own chambers. Dani had served there many times before, but she had never seen the corridor where she was led or the staircase up which Ato walked. When the staircase ended at last, she was gestured into a small but well-appointed room with candles burning in each corner. “Be seated,” said the High Priestess, nodding toward a chair. Dani sat, burying her hands in her lap.

The High Priestess was a small woman with a round face, only partly given over to wrinkles and crossed with black tattoos that outlined the bones of her skull. The smooth sides of her shaved head glowed in the candlelight as she leaned it to one side, considering Dani.

“You speak Oureen,” she said at last.

Dani had to clear her throat. “I do, Mother. That is, I did—I spoke it at home when I was young.”

Ato nodded. “And do you remember it?”

“Yes, Mother, though I do not use it often.” She had learned to speak the precise Thamian of the upper class since coming here, and though there were several other Oureen speakers among the moon’s devotees, none of them were in Dani’s phase, and she saw them only rarely.

“We’ll hope it’s enough,” said the High Priestess, unperturbed. “I have need of a translator, child. This will take you away from your other duties for a time.”

“All my time is yours for the asking, Mother. But—”

“Yes?”

“Forgive me, Mother. Aren’t there others here who speak it as well or better, who would be more suited to the task than I?”

“Than a new-made priestess waxing crescent, of no birth and little training?” Ato smiled, amused but not unkind. “Forgive _me_ , child, but that is why I’ve chosen you. There are others I could have asked, but they all have ties outside these walls. Allegiances, family bonds. You are a fishmonger’s daughter, an orphan, chosen by lot for the service of the moon. If you were placed here by one of the Six, or by the sun’s own, then they have far more subtlety even than I realized.”

Dani opened her mouth to ask what the Council of Six could possibly have to do with her, considered better, and closed it. Then she said, “I am no one’s instrument but the Goddess’, Mother.”

“So I hope,” said Ato, sitting back in her chair. “Because today one of the sun’s own presented herself at our gate and told us her High Priestess is corrupt, and has arranged for the death of the Third of Six. Calm yourself—here, drink this.”

Dani took the wine with gratitude, finding her hands almost steady, though steadiness was the last thing she felt. When her throat would work again she said, “And how can I serve in this, Mother?”

“We have sent to the Third of Six, of course,” said the High Priestess, as though it was the merest triviality to contact one of the heads of the Empire. Perhaps for her, it truly was. “And warned her of a threat, but not of its source. For that, I need a great deal more information. Much as it might please our goddess to have that house of death brought low, I cannot raise a hand against my counterpart without proof—much less ask the Six to do it. I need this child of the sun to tell me much more than she has, and her Thamian is halting at best. What comes, I suppose, of sending a goddess’s children far from the heart of the Empire to do the Council’s bloody work. But she speaks Oureen. Will you do it?”

How could she not?

Their guest—Dani was not quite certain if “prisoner” was the correct word, even as she passed under the watchful eye of two guards—had been installed in a small chamber at the heart of the High Priestess’ quarters. She looked up without surprise as Ato walked in, veiled in sheerest black; then her eyes fell on Dani in her gray veil and narrowed.

She was not quite beautiful, Dani thought, though she could not have said why. A slight irregularity in the hawklike features, perhaps. Her skin was like burnished bronze, glowing in the candlelight, and she had ignored the low bench and chair and instead sat straight like a pillar on the floor of the room, her legs folded in front of her. They had taken away her scabbard.

“I have brought an interpreter,” said Ato in Thamian.

She looked to Dani, who realized belatedly that she was expected to begin. She did not know the Oureen for ‘interpreter’—it had not been in her vocabulary as a child. She turned toward the seated woman. “I am here to speak Oureen,” she said in that language, with slow and deliberate attention to her consonants.

The woman on the floor looked from Dani to the High Priestess, then back again. Her voice, when she spoke, was a low, measured alto. “Your accent is familiar. Where are you from?”

Dani hesitated. “She wants to know where I lived before I was swallowed by the moon, Mother.”

Ato sighed. “The sun’s children are ever concerned with the outside world. Tell her, if you like. It will do no harm if she sees some kinship in you.”

“I am from the southern coast,” Dani said, looking down at the other woman. She felt the impulse to sit, herself, and wished the sun’s child would stand instead. “I am Danira—” the oft-repeated phrase died on her tongue. She must have heard the names of the moon’s phase dozens of times in her mother’s visits to the temple, but she could not think of the phrase ‘waxing crescent’. “I am Danira, the young moon. Who are you?”

The sun’s child laughed. “What need has the moon of my name? I am of the First House of my priesthood; I have served the sun in her glory for twenty years. You may call me Esada.” It was the Oureen for ‘noon’.

“What is she saying?”

Dani had all but forgotten her duty; she struggled now to put Esada’s defiance into grammatical Thamian. “She will not give her name, Mother. She is of the First House of the sun. I do not know what that means.”

“It means she is gifted, and deadly—but I have been assuming that much, at least. Ask her if she is in the confidence of the sun’s High Priestess, and how she discovered what she knows.”

Dani worked her way through the translation, stumbling over the unfamiliar names and place-names that riddled Esada’s tale. She was not one of the sun’s closest daughters, but had traveled throughout the southern islands even to the outer edges of the Empire, doing the sun’s bidding and the bidding of the Six. At the conclusion of her most recent mission she had been recalled to the capital, and there she learned of her High Priestess’ plans. “It was a secretary in the service of the Third of Six who told me,” Esada said. “I had been sent to shed the sun’s light on his use of the Council’s funds. In his fear he offered me information and said he had been bribed to give reports of his mistress’ movements.”

“And that told you your High Priestess wished her harm?”

“Hardly,” said Esada. “But it interested me. When I had finished with the secretary, I made further inquiries. I think,” she said, considering, “he was considered unimportant, but needed to be removed. I believe if I had not continued to ask questions I should have been sent back out to the islands. Conveniently absent for whatever was to come.”

“And what,” asked Ato, using Dani’s voice and native tongue, “is to come?”

“The death of the Third,” Esada replied, “and the elevation of the sun’s High Priestess to the council.”

***

They stayed there well after sunrise and well after moonset, pausing now and again for wine and food, which Esada consumed hungrily and without comment on the plainness on the fare. Ato drew out of her every detail of her investigation, the proof she had gathered, the corruption she had traced to the highest levels of her own priesthood.

“It is my calling and my duty to shed light,” Esada said at last. “But the Third of Six is confined in preparation for childbed and inaccessible to one of my station, and I did not know where to turn, when any of the sun’s daughters might trust their High Priestess rather than believe me. Or might be corrupt herself.” She hesitated, showing for the first time an emotional reaction to her own words; or perhaps it was only the fatigue coming through at last. “So I came to the moon, knowing you would be able to reach her. But you must hurry.”

“It has been done,” Ato said calmly. She at least did not look tired, Dani thought with exhausted envy; Dani’s own phase would only just be rising now, and she thought with longing of her cell and pallet and a world where she might sleep, unconcerned with the politics of the Empire. “We have daughters in her house in anticipation of the birth; they will also have word of this by now. A commander in the guard of the Six is in my direct employ, and I have given him instructions.” Dani blinked but otherwise managed to hide her reaction to the idea that her own High Priestess was so involved in external affairs. “You have done well, sun’s child. But you must know what is to come, when the Third of Six and her partisans learn who is responsible.”

A ripple moved through Esada’s straight-backed form. She swallowed, throat shifting in the candlelight; it had been hours since their last cup of wine. “I know it may raze the following of the sun to the ground.”

“We shall see,” said Ato, clearly and calmly. The Thamian was so simple, and the comprehension in Esada’s eyes so obvious, that it needed no translation. “In the meantime, we must think what to do with you, child.”

“I have arranged transport to the southern islands,” Esada began, but Dani had barely begun to translate before Ato shook her head.

“No,” she said. “That will not do. You must be protected, yes; but you must also be _here_ , until this has broken fully. There will be questions. You may need to answer them, if I cannot.” Esada’s face, carefully blank before, was as stone now. “These chambers in my quarters are as secure as any I can give you. I have placed additional guards at my gates. This is best. Now rest, and you will know soon enough what comes of all this.”

As the door closed behind them, the High Priestess turned to Dani. “And you, child—I may have need of you again.”

“I am at your service and the moon’s, Mother.”

“And furthermore,” said Ato, not ungently, “I think it best if you also are kept in isolation until this reaches some resolution.”

“I would not breathe a word, Mother—”

“I am sure you would not,” Ato replied, but Dani could see her mind was already elsewhere, moving ahead to the next step in this game. “It is for your protection as much as anything else. You know now almost as much as I do of this matter. No, you will stay here. I will have a cell prepared, and instructions will be given to your phase mother. Now you must rest as well,” she said, fixing Dani with a kindly healer’s gaze. “Be easy, child; all will come right under the goddess’ eye.”

***

Dani fell into the pallet that had been prepared for her and prayed for sleep. It came slowly and uneasily; she was used to the play of light from the small, high-set window of her cell, and the unfamiliar chamber disturbed her nearly as much as the memory of the conversations from the night before.

When at last she rose from a fitful sleep she found that food and wine had been left for her, and a small cup of goats’ milk that she might participate in the daily worship. She ate and drank and sang her hymns, though she did not know if it was yet moonrise or not.

As the sunlight faded from the chamber window, she heard a rhythmic chanting through the wall; it was not in Oureen and not in Thamian, but in a language she did not know. She tried her door and, finding it unlocked, veiled herself before walking slowly down the hall to a small inner courtyard that she thought must be at the heart of the High Priestess’ quarters. Moving between the heavy green ferns, she saw Esada’s kneeling form at the far end of the yard. Dani sat on a low stone ledge, dangling her fingers in the fountain that played there, and listened.

Esada finished and rose in a single, smooth motion. Placing her hand at her side where the sword and scabbard ought to be, she bowed low, then straightened and turned to see Dani watching.

“What language is that?” Dani asked.

“It is old Thamian,” said Esada, her eyebrows raised like two dark bows drawn across her high bronze forehead. “The purer form, which you do not speak here. But I’m surprised you don’t recognize it.”

“It isn’t the moon’s tongue,” said Dani, a little defensive.

“Still,” said Esada, settling on the ledge opposite her, regarding Dani with a mix of curiosity and mild surprise. “Are the moon’s daughters not educated in the history of our tongue?”

“We are taught what we need to know.”

“Yes,” Esada said. “Midwifery and the binding up of wounds. I am sure if I pointed to any herb in this garden, you could tell me its use without hesitation. But if we stepped beyond these walls, what use would you be?”

“I will go outside, and soon,” Dani said. “When I reach the next phase, I’ll don a blue veil and serve in the hospitals in the capitol, or in one of the birthing houses.”

Esada let out a noise that was not quite a laugh, and Dani fought down what she wanted to say: that as a child she had been a fisherwoman’s daughter, and the sea had been in her blood, and she had not been useless: she could run a light boat between the two largest of the southern isles faster than anyone her age. But she felt this would be disloyal to her priesthood.

“Why do you wear the veil now, inside your own convent?” Esada asked.

“Because you are here,” Dani said, now surprised herself. “Unless it is required for our work—as it may be, to bind a wound or perform a surgery or to perform similar tasks—we do not unveil before any but the moon’s own.”

Esada shook her head slowly. “You will die never having lived a life. I will never understand those who choose to lock themselves away from the world.”

“It is not always a choice,” Dani said, without quite meaning to; and then, fearing she had said too much, she added, “The world is a place of pain and corruption, and if we are too long in it we risk infection ourselves, and spreading that infection to those in need of peace and healing. We serve best in our isolation.” She did not know if she had ever learned the Oureen for ‘quarantine’.

“Well parroted,” Esada said. “You must be a devoted child of the moon, to believe that while your own High Priestess is going out into the world to arrange it to her liking.”

“This crisis is not of her making,” said Dani; for it _was_ a crisis, she could recognize that, even cloistered away from the concerns of the world as she was.

Esada’s mouth thinned. Her lips were full and ruddier than the rest of her sun-kissed skin, and they were the softest thing about her but for that long, ink-black hair. “She did not object to having a hand in ending it. Well, no need to quarrel; if she means to keep us here until she is satisfied with the results, we will have a great deal to talk about. I am sure you have other questions.”

“What?” asked Dani, startled.

Esada smiled a narrow, knowing smile that showed none of her teeth. “Were you waiting here all through my devotions only to ask me what language they were in?”

That had been her intent, Dani had been certain of it; but challenged directly, and under the force of that smile, she had to admit her curiosity ran along other lines. “How many people have you killed?”

Esada’s face did not change. “In open combat, or in judgement?”

Dani suppressed a shiver. “Is that what you call it?”

“You would call me an assassin, I suppose,” said Esada, leaning her head back against the trunk of the palm tree behind her. Her hair had begun to loosen from its braids. “That is the word used? ‘Assassin’?” She said it in both Oureen and Thamian, her accent in the latter oddly stilted. Dani realized it was very like how she herself had sounded when she arrived here. “You object to my calling?”

“The moon’s realm is healing and easing a painful death,” Dani said, stumbling a little over the rote phrases from the chants as she translated them. “If the sun’s is violence, that is your business.”

“Not mine,” said Esada easily. “The business of the Six, and the sun whom they serve. I don’t deal death often, and never without cause. The sun’s realm—is that how you put it?—is the light of truth, and the justice that follows. I have killed three women and two men in judgment. Their crimes had earned it.”

Dani’s eyes dropped to Esada’s left hand, the one with which she had drawn her sword the day before. It was long and firm, well-calloused; it reminded Dani of her mother the fisherwoman’s hand. She imagined it dealing a killing blow. Esada turned it palm-up for Dani’s inspection.

“Can you see the blood?” she asked, mocking. Dani got up without a word and left.

Ato did not return that night, or the next day. Dani was unused to being mistress of her own time and frustrated at the lack of occupation. She kept her ear tuned for the chime of bells from the temple, so that she knew what her phase-sisters would be about: tending the gardens and gathering herbs, or preparing food in the kitchens; at lectures or the dissection table, learning the goddess’ craft; at worship or meditation. Those last two she could do on her own, but the sound of her voice rising alone where usually it was lifted by the harmonies above and below was strange to her, and lonely.

When Esada was not at worship herself, she seemed to spend most of her time in the courtyard, engaged in exercise. Dani watched in fascination as she ran through a complex and dancelike series of movements early in the morning, the flow of her well-muscled arms and powerful legs only marred by the absence of the sword in the hand she extended and sliced through the air. At midday she climbed onto the ledge where she had been sitting, then leapt up to seize a branch of the olive tree that grew in the center of the courtyard, and began to pull herself repeatedly up so her head cleared the branch before she lowered herself slowly back down, tension in every line of her arms. When she had finished this, her loose linen trousers and tunic dripping with sweat, she hooked her legs over the branch instead and, with agonizing effort, folded herself until her head and shoulders were nearly upright. After years of lessons in anatomy and the occasional private exploration in one of her phase-sisters’ cells, Dani was well-versed in human musculature; she imagined the hard ridges of Esada’s abdomen under her fingers, and she had to look away, glad the veil hid her expression.

They talked as well, having so little else to do, but they chose less fraught subjects than on the day before. Dani had grown up in one of the smaller southern districts, and Esada did not know the place but showed great interest, though mostly in subjects Dani had not paid much attention to when she lived there: the local wines, the small court where the sun's justice was dealt, the dances performed at midsummer. Talking of these things, Dani found it difficult to remember the woman she was speaking with had taken life. Dani would do many things in the moon’s service. Her own right hand, tattooed to show the phalanges and metacarpals of her third and fourth finger, had cut into living and dead flesh alike without hesitation. Yet she could not imagine cutting into living to make it dead.

When the next moonrise came, their meals were accompanied by a wooden box filled with scrolls from the convent’s library, most on the medical uses of exotic northern plants Dani and her phase-sisters had been studying. Seeing this, Dani sighed; so they were not to be released the following day, either.

“You should take off the veil,” Esada told her that next day, as Dani sat reading in the hot courtyard to take advantage of the natural light. “Surely the moon’s daughters know the dangers of the afternoon sun.”

“I have had plenty of water,” Dani said absently, turning the scroll in her hands.

“But you are uncomfortable,” Esada said, “and the moon is hidden; she won’t see you. But I wish to.”

Dani looked up, startled, as a shadow fell across her page; Esada had moved to stand over her, her hair falling down over one shoulder as her hands moved through it to form sleek braids. She had just bathed after her midday exercise, and Dani could smell the heady scent of jasmine from the bath oils. “ _You_ wish to?”

“Yes,” said Esada. “As I wish to see that little coastal district of yours, and one day the northern stretches of the empire, and the south seas beyond our borders. Because I am restless, and it is there to see, and I think it might please me.”

Dani let the scroll fall to her lap, staring up at her, and the heat soaking through her from the sun was met by a heat growing within. She was certain Esada could see it in her eyes, though the veil hid everything else. “And if it does not please me?” 

“You will have to try harder to convince me of that,” Esada said. She left Dani then, but Dani’s thoughts had strayed far from her reading, and they would not be brought back again.

That evening they dined together between moonrise and sunset. “I do not mind the cloistered life, truly,” Dani said, as Esada finished her wine. It was almost the truth. “It is something to be useful, and to be at peace.”

“You think I am not at peace?”

“I don’t think you would be here if you were,” Dani said honestly, watching Esada’s mouth tighten in that way that she had. “I think it is as well for you to talk of the light of the sun’s justice as it is for me to talk of the moon’s isolation from corruption.” While even now, Ato worked in the outside world, engaged in all its politics and machinations. “You do as your goddess wills, as do I; I do as my High Priestess wills, as you have done. But does the bloodshed truly not trouble you?”

“I knew its cause,” Esada said, flat and final. “It was earned.”

“And desired, but whose desires did you carry out?”

Esada laid down her wine with deliberation and took up instead the small knife that lay between them, which Dani had been using to pit olives. She looked at it a moment, then without warning drew it swiftly across the palm of her right hand.

Dani cried out. “What—”

“And this blood, it is also earned,” Esada said, holding up her hand so Dani could see the droplets welling. “It is a willing sacrifice to the sun; so is every drop I have shed, my own and that of others. You do me insult to question that.”

Dani ignored this, leaning forward to take Esada’s hand and examine the cut. It was not deep, and was not bleeding much. “What were you thinking?”

“That you ought to bind it up,” Esada said, flexing her fingers lightly.

Dani rose. “Yes, of course. I will fetch some gauze.”

“But you must take off your veil to do it,” said Esada, her hand still resting in Dani’s, her head tilted back to expose the curve of her throat. “You said you must, to bind a wound.”

Dani said nothing at first, and then she began to laugh. And when Esada turned her hand to grip Dani by the wrist and pull her down, she went willingly, sitting on the ledge close beside her. And, hesitating only a little, Dani reached up to loosen her veil.

The night air was cool on her bare head, shaved only a few days before. Esada reached up to touch it, running her fingertips from Dani’s temple to the nape of her neck. “You are so soft,” she said, a little mocking and a little breathless. “I suppose you will make love sweetly, too.”

Dani shoved her hard against the wall of the courtyard and reached up to seize a fistful of her long, dark hair. Then she pulled Esada down to catch her surprised laugh in her mouth, crushing the remnants of their dinner between them—and it _was_ so, so sweet, but with an edge of fire beneath.

***

She woke in Esada’s chamber to the midnight bells, the taste of her still in her mouth—bright and molten—and raised herself on one elbow to survey Esada’s sleeping form. She could see the white of the bandage wound about Esada’s hand, but it was too dim to see the places on her hip and shoulder where Dani thought she had left bruises; her own arms were sore from Esada’s grip, and she smiled to herself. It was a bittersweet smile, though, and after a moment she said aloud, “You are not at ease with it, are you?” She spoke in Thamian so as not to be understood, and leaning closer said, “Shall I tell you the truth? The moon brings peace to my heart at times and discontent at others, like the tides. And I do not know which will win in the end.”

Esada made a sound low in her throat and shifted on the pallet, her hair brushing against Dani’s breast. Dani got back down beside her and lay there a long time in silence, watching the play of light and shadow across the chamber walls from the gibbous moon, staring at the back of her hand and the long dark tattoos of the bones.

***

Ato returned two days later, unannounced, and walked into the courtyard at moonset to find Esada at her morning exercises and Dani, unveiled, drinking tea by the fountain. Dani started and would have raised her veil, but hesitated in mixed defiance and apprehension. She wished she could see the High Priestess’ expression.

Ato was carrying Esada’s sword and scabbard. Her black robes and veil turned her into a watchful shadow until Esada finished and came toward them, her face still and expectant. Dani thought she saw apprehension there, too.

“It is done,” said the High Priestess. “The Third of Six is delivered of a male child, may the moon’s light fall upon him, and the Third is well and safe. The sun’s High Priestess has fallen to the sword of her own daughters, her guilt proved beyond doubt. The First House of the sun is in disarray; the Council of Six meets tomorrow to begin dealing with it, and to weed out the remnants of corruption where it has grown.” Esada’s eyes fell closed as Dani translated. “You have done very well, sun’s child; it has been recognized, and it will be remembered as matters progress.”

Esada did not seem gratified by this. “And this meeting of the Six. Am I to assume you will attend?”

“But of course,” said Ato. “This is a time of great conflict. The Empire shall require healing, and that is the moon’s realm.”

“Healing,” Esada said, sudden venom in her tone. “Or the easing of a painful death.”

Ato held up a hand before Dani could translate. “You are grieving; this is understandable. But let us part friends. I wish to thank you by name.”

“You may call me ‘Oreida’,” she said. It was the Oureen for ‘sunset’. “I am done.” And she turned on her heel and left, leaving the sword and scabbard behind.

After a swift glance at Ato, who made no motion toward her, Dani darted after her, raising her veil as she went, and caught her up just as she was leaving the inner chambers. There were no longer any guards to stop her. “Where are you going?”

“Away. Away from my own corrupt priesthood, and the isolated purity of this place that would welcome the death of my sun.”

“Is it safe?” Esada—Oreida—let out a harsh laugh. Of course it would not be safe for her, not when she had thrown the sun’s entire priesthood into chaos, with some of them still loyal to their High Priestess and prepared to deal death for betrayal. “Before you go, tell me you will be safe, only that.”

Oreida stopped in her tracks, raising her hand to her eyes. She drew a halting breath, shaken as Dani had never seen her. Then she said, “I did not go into this unprepared. At midnight on the full moon there will be a boat waiting for me at the far point of the harbor.” She looked at Dani, and her eyes were fierce. “There is a whole world to sail to. The sun shines on all of it, and the moon as well.”

“What are you saying?”

“You heard me,” said Oreida. “Choose as you will; it makes no difference to me.” And without another word, without looking back, she walked away.

***

Three nights later, Dani was ushered into Ato’s presence, both of them unveiled. “I suppose I should have anticipated this,” said the High Priestess. She looked tired from her long work with the Council, all at unaccustomed hours. The skull tattooed across her face seemed to sag. “You are certain of your decision? It was made very quickly.”

“I have spent my days and nights in deepest prayer and meditation, at the urging of my phase-mother,” Dani said honestly; her knees were sore from kneeling. “The moon’s path is mine as well as yours, Mother, but sometimes it draws us away.”

Ato sighed, and then she reached into the purse about her waist and pulled out of it a small silver ring, handing it across into Dani’s hand. It was shaped as a crescent nearly closed at one side, and it slid easily onto Dani’s thumb. “Then take that, if you will, and do not forget us,” said the High Priestess.

“What is it, Mother?”

“A sign that you are mine,” said Ato, voice very gentle. “If you take it to the prioress at any of the moon’s convents throughout our Empire, she will know it and lend you aid, or take your message to me. You see, Danira—no longer waxing crescent—I have been considering for some time that it would be as well to have eyes and ears in the wider world, the better to understand its goings-on. I have sent others out before you.”

The ring had gone cold on Dani’s thumb. “To understand its goings-on,” she repeated; “and its corruption. That we might influence it.”

“That we might cure it, my child. Quarantine is a necessary part of our service, but we must not lose touch entirely.” And she smiled a weary mother’s smile, and laid her hand on Dani’s. “Go, then—but do not forget us.”

Farewells made, Dani gathered her few belongings and walked, for the first time in years, out the front gate of the convent she had called home. The full moon hung bright over the sea, lighting her way along the road to the harbor; she drew in the salt air, and it was as though her lungs had learned how to breathe again.

When she reached the far point of the harbor, she found a small sailboat moored there as promised; a lovely little thing, tidy enough to be crewed one-handed but, she thought, just large enough for two.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Oreida said, walking up behind her. “You know nothing of the world.”

“I know a great deal about sailing,” said Dani, “and about medicine. Both of which you may find useful. And I know how to bring you to joy three times in a night.”

“That is true enough,” said Oreida. “I should have realized a convent was the place to develop such skills. I will not underestimate the cloistered life again. Will you miss the purity of your isolation, do you think?”

Dani played with the band about her thumb. There was a bitter taste in her mouth. “It was not so pure as all that. And you, Oreida—will you miss the clarity of the sun’s guidance?”

“My name is Kaira,” she said, and leapt lightly into the boat, stretching out a hand for Dani to follow.

As they skimmed across the waves, Dani considered the ring she had been given, and the offer and request that lay beneath it. She imagined slipping it from her thumb and hurling it far out into the water where she would never need to think of it again. But she did not.

They reached the edge of the harbor, and the moon drew them out with the tide, out to the open sea.


End file.
